Grape flavored beverages typically contain natural or artificial colorants which impart a purple color to the beverage. The purple color of such beverages is normally the first sensory quality by which grape flavored beverages are judged by consumers. Consumers initially associate beverage quality, flavor and strength with beverage color. They are conditioned to expect that grape juice or grape flavored drinks have a certain bright purple appearance. Deviation from such an appearance can alter not only one's initial impression of the beverage quality, flavor and strength, but also ones flavor perception when actually consuming the beverage.
This highly desirable bright purple appearance is easily obtained by adding "natural" colorants such as enocianina (grape skin extract) to grape flavored beverages. "Natural" colorants are those obtained from vegetable, animal, or mineral sources or are synthetic duplicates of naturally occurring colorants. There are currently about 21 such "natural" colors approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use as food additives. However, such "natural" colorants are not typically used in shelf stable beverages. Shelf-stable beverages are normally subjected to high temperature sterilization prior to packaging which can destroy these "natural"colorants. Notwithstanding this inability to withstand such sterilization conditions, these "natural" colorants are also degraded when exposed to prolonged ambient temperatures (e.g., store shelf temperatures).
Shelf-stable beverages have therefore been colored with the more heat-stable artificial colorants (FD&C colorants). There are currently about nine FD&C colorants approved as food additives. FD&C colorants tend to be more heat stable than "natural" colorants and can be subjected to sterilization processes as well as prolonged ambient shelf temperatures without substantial degradation. However, the use of FD&C purple-producing colorants in shelf stable beverages has heretofore resulted in blackish or extremely dark-purple colored shelf stable beverages. Dilution of these FD&C colorants can eliminate this undesirable blackish appearance but then results in a commercially undesirable grayish-purple color.
Given the foregoing, there remains a need to provide purple colored shelf stable beverages with a brightened, more desirable, purple coloration.